Naked-Eye | Startgaze — Astronomy, Stargazing & Space Science

The Pleiades star cluster in a colour survey photograph: a handful of bright blue-white stars wrapped in wispy blue reflection nebulosity against a black field scattered with fainter stars

Beginner stargazing

How to find the Pleiades, and what a star count says about your sky

Look east-northeast a couple of hours after dark this week and you’ll find a small, tight knot of blue-white stars climbing out of the horizon haze. Most people take it for a smudge the first time they see it, and some take it for the Little Dipper. That’s the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, Messier 45, and from now until spring it’s the easiest star cluster in the sky. You need nothing but your eyes to find it. Once you have, it doubles as a dark-sky test: count how many stars you can pick out of the knot and you have a rough reading of how good your sky is that night. ...

Composite night photograph of the Orionid meteor shower: about a dozen thin meteor streaks cross a dark blue starry sky above a row of silhouetted pine trees and a pond, with the constellation Orion visible at upper left.

Celestial event

Orionids 2026: wait out the gibbous Moon, then watch Halley's meteors until dawn

The Orionid meteor shower peaks on the night of October 21–22, 2026, and this year the Moon decides when you go out. A waxing gibbous Moon, about 80% lit, hangs over the evening sky and doesn’t set until 02:55 local time in Cyprus (23:55 UT) on the peak morning. After that you get roughly two and a half hours of properly dark sky before dawn starts at 05:34. Those happen to be the hours when the Orionid radiant is highest anyway. Set an alarm for 03:00, look south, and expect around 10–12 meteors an hour from a dark site, fewer from a town. No equipment needed. ...

Telescope photograph of Mars and Jupiter close together on a black star field: Mars is a small orange point near the top, Jupiter a brighter blue-white point lower down with tiny dots of its moons beside it, both with four-pointed diffraction spikes.

Celestial event

Mars is closing on Jupiter: watch the gap shrink to 1.2° by November 16

Two bright planets are up before dawn right now, and the gap between them shrinks every morning for the next month. This morning Mars and Jupiter are 12.7° apart, a bit more than a fist held at arm’s length. By the morning of November 16 that gap is down to 1.19°, a little over two full-Moon widths. Closest approach is around 02:00 UT on the 16th, which is 04:00 in Cyprus, with both planets riding high in the south-east. You don’t need any equipment for this one. Pick a morning each week, note how far apart the two points are, and watch Mars catch up. Binoculars add Jupiter’s moons. Around the 16th, a small telescope at its lowest power can just about hold both planets in a single field. ...

A line of evenly spaced Starlink satellites crossing a deep-blue twilight sky above the painted town hall on Tübingen's market square

Beginner stargazing

Plane, satellite or space station? How to identify a moving light in the night sky

A point of light is sliding across the sky, silently, and you want to know what it is. You can almost always answer that in about ten seconds with four checks. Look at whether it blinks, whether it moves in a dead-straight line at an even pace, whether it fades out in the middle of the sky, and how long it lasts. No gear needed, and a free pass-prediction website will confirm your guess afterwards. The key below is the one I use from my balcony in Nicosia; the sections after it explain each line. ...

The constellation Pegasus over a dark horizon at night, its four Great Square stars and the horse's neck joined by faint drawn lines and labelled 'Pegasus', with a hilltop silhouette and distant town lights below

Beginner stargazing

How to find the Great Square of Pegasus, the autumn sky's biggest signpost

Go outside after dark this week and look east. There’s a big, slightly lopsided square of four stars climbing over the rooftops, and you need nothing to find it but your eyes. That’s the Great Square of Pegasus, and for the next two months it’s the easiest landmark in the sky. Learn it once and it becomes your key to the whole autumn sky: it points the way to the Andromeda galaxy, it doubles as a ruler and a dark-sky meter, and it marks the season turning over. ...

A crescent Moon with faint earthshine at right, the overexposed point of Venus at center, and Earth's blue atmospheric limb at lower left, photographed from the ISS

Celestial event

Venus hits its brightest for 2026 on September 18 — catch it low in the west now

Venus is about to be the brightest it gets all year. On the evening of September 18, 2026, it reaches greatest brilliancy at about magnitude −4.8, outshining everything in the sky except the Sun and Moon. The catch, if you’re watching from the eastern Mediterranean like I am at 35°N, is that this is a low, quick apparition: Venus sits close to the western horizon after sunset and drops out of view inside about an hour. You don’t need any gear — it’s a naked-eye object that punches straight through city light — but you do need a clear line to the west-southwest and the discipline to be outside on time. The best single evening is September 14, when a thin crescent Moon parks within 5° of it. ...

A waxing gibbous Moon through a telescope, craters and mountains thrown into sharp relief along the terminator, the day–night line running down the left of the disc.

Beginner stargazing

Moon phases, explained: how the lunar cycle sets your dark-sky nights

The single biggest thing standing between you and a good night under the stars isn’t your gear, your location, or even the weather. It’s the Moon. A full Moon can raise the brightness of the whole sky enough to erase the Milky Way, wash out every meteor fainter than a fireball, and flatten a galaxy into a grey smudge. A week later the same sky, from the same spot, with the same eyes, shows all of it. Nothing changed but the phase. ...

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31): a bright oval core wrapped in tilted spiral arms, with the small companion galaxies M32 and M110 nearby, in a hydrogen-alpha filtered long exposure.

Beginner stargazing

How to find the Andromeda Galaxy with your naked eye

The most distant thing you can see without any equipment is a galaxy 2.5 million light-years away, and autumn is the season to find it. The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) climbs into the evening sky through September and October, and from a reasonably dark spot it looks like a small, elongated grey smudge in the constellation Andromeda. No telescope, no binoculars, no app subscription. Just your eyes, a little patience, and knowing where to point them. ...

A single Perseid meteor crossing the Milky Way with the Andromeda galaxy overhead, above a treeline lit by light pollution on the horizon, at Luhasoo bog in Estonia

Beginner stargazing

Your first meteor shower: how to watch the 2026 Perseids with no gear

If you’ve never sat out on purpose to watch a meteor shower, the night of August 12 into the morning of August 13 is the one to start with. The Perseids peak then, and this year the Moon is new, so there’s no moonlight to drown the fainter streaks. It’s the darkest Perseid peak since 2021. You don’t need a telescope, binoculars, an app, or any skill you don’t already have. You need somewhere reasonably dark, something to lie back on, and about an hour of patience. Here’s exactly what to do with it. ...

The Milky Way arching over snow-covered trees at Torres del Paine in Patagonia, with Alpha and Beta Centauri the two brightest stars in the band.

Beginner stargazing

Turn your phone into a star chart: a beginner's guide to stargazing apps

The fastest way to start finding things in the night sky costs nothing and is already in your pocket. Hold your phone up, and a decent stargazing app will name the bright dot you’ve been squinting at: Arcturus, or Jupiter, or the International Space Station about to clear your roofline. No telescope, no printed atlas, no memorising constellations first. That’s the pitch, and it mostly holds up. The catch is that the app store is stuffed with near-identical star maps, half of them want a subscription, and the headline “just point your phone at the sky” feature breaks in ways nobody warns you about. Here’s how I’d pick one, based on what I actually keep on my phone in Nicosia and hand to friends who’ve never found anything but the Moon. ...